How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

For anyone that is interested, Sidekiq was featured in a RailsCasts episode #366 [1].

[1] http://railscasts.com/episodes/366-sidekiq

Really impressed by how customer-friendly the licensing is:

> How many licenses do I need to buy?

> Every organization that runs Sidekiq Pro for their own benefit must purchase a license.

> GitHub runs *.github.com. They need one license for their entire site.

> GitHub sells GitHub Enterprise to various customers. They need one license per customer because the product is installed and run locally by the customer.

> Pivotal Labs builds websites on behalf of customers. They need one license per customer because the customer is the one getting the benefit of Sidekiq.

I think there are likely a variety of contractual options other than "24/7 phone support" which businesses would be happy to pay for, on an ongoing basis. For example, you could charge $500 plus $100 per year for "maintenance", and not be any more specific than "the software will be maintained in an ongoing fashion", and now you won't be starting from $0 next January 1st. As someone who has started from $0 every January 1st for the last 7 -- don't do it! It sucks!

Congrats, though -- Sidekiq is one of the few commercial OSS offerings that I know of doing well in the Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Most of the others just act as friendcatchers for consulting, too.

> charge $500 plus $100 per year for "maintenance", and not be any more specific than "the software will be maintained in an ongoing fashion"

I work at a mega corp, and I cannot echo this enough, we have tons of "maintenance" agreements for hardware and software of all sorts, $100 is not even in the noise level for some of these agreements! Software needs to be maintained, get this done upfront, it is a total pain in the but to have something fail, and then try and push through a purchase for "maintenance" after the fact. This means that I have to get a quote, get my boss to sign off, get purchasing in the loop, etc, etc. Just have this as an annual agreement and it will get processed like everything else. 10 years later, someone will ask, who uses this, and no one will know, and it will get renewed, just because they don't want something to fail ;)

Having a large picture of someone's face staring at me next to the text distracts me, creeps me out, and makes it very difficult for me to read. Lots of tech blogs have this anti-feature but this one is particularly egregious.